


A Name Written That No Man Knew

by SylvanWitch



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Apocafic, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-24
Updated: 2012-08-24
Packaged: 2017-11-12 18:45:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,915
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/494459
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SylvanWitch/pseuds/SylvanWitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>The Traveler brings with him the dust of the past and gathers as he goes the whispers of the dead.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Name Written That No Man Knew

**Author's Note:**

> Try not to let the pairing squick you. This is not (really, actually, although maybe...) a love song.

_The Traveler brings with him the dust of the past and gathers as he goes the whispers of the dead.  Where he rides, the wind follows, and in it, you can hear them, crying out both night and day of all that has been lost.  He rides alone, though the dead are legion, and never speaks himself but for one word, The Name.  And all who are left to hear it forget themselves and fall down onto the earth and cry out for it to hide them from that terrible noise, the dreadful voice._

 

The rider appears from this distance as no more than a shadow on the land, but since the portents have been tolling like death kneels for days, Bobby’s ready for him when he approaches the gate.

 

That and there’s nowhere else the rider could be going.  The Way Station is the only building left for at least a hundred miles, surrounded as it is on all sides by the blasted bones of the scattered dead and the remains of houses, trees, cars, every evidence of human existence—all slipping, sibilant and insidious, to dust and ashes.

 

On a quiet day, you can hear the world ending like the hiss of a snake with no garden to hide it.

 

Crows kick up a ruckus overhead, lifting from the sagging roof to cloud his yard with inky shadows.

  
“Shut up,” he mutters, waving a hand at them.  They settle with ruffled grace, the downdraft of their wings carrying the faintest odor of insistent decay.

 

Under the porch, Coot whines, chin on his paws, one worried eye pried open to watch Bobby uncertainly.

 

“Easy, Coot,” Bobby says, not unkindly.  The dog’s the last pup of the last bitch in the world, his muzzle gray, eyes rheumy.  He’s the only regular company besides the crows that Bobby keeps.

 

Beneath his wrinkled hand, the gate creaks, a spine-shuddering sound like shrieking at a distance.  As always, it harbingers something unwanted coming.

 

This rider never comes without trouble.

 

_Upon him are the marks of the sins of the flesh and in his eye abomination._

 

They don’t talk.  Anything they might have said has long since been exhausted.  The rider’s sour breath bursts with his ragged curses across Bobby’s neck.  A hand palsied with age, swollen joints arthritic, clamps gnarled around the rider’s angry red shaft and works machine-like to bring him to release.

 

Whatever might have stirred inside of him, paternal or otherwise, dried up long ago.  Bile no longer rises bitter at the back of his throat.  The man’s curses no longer sting his heart, shriveled as it is.  It beats sluggishly in his chest as he feels the rider stiffen, feels the involuntary clench of muscles and then the hot wash across his wrist.

 

The rider steps back, and Bobby hears his boots scuff the floor, his rusted zipper close tooth by tooth, and finally tears his eyes away from the waterstained hall wallpaper to look at the rider and say, “You eaten?”

 

Dean shakes his head.

 

“C’mon.”

 

Over beans tasting like the can they came in, Dean fills Bobby in on his latest journey, talks of people he’s seen, places he’s gone to that used to have names like Cincinnati and Minneapolis and Detroit.

 

Now they’re Rusted Root and Cave In and Quarter Blown.  Bobby knows.  He’s drawn the maps in scrabbling, cramped hand, dried sepia ink like blood stains pooling in new shapes to make up the world as it is now in its last, largely unwritten days.

 

“Guy says he saw him a couple months back near Quarter Blown,”  Dean croaks like the crows overhead, who stir uneasily, a constant susurrus above them, like whispers he can’t quite decipher in a language he never could quite learn.

 

They’re never quiet when Dean’s in the house.

 

“The pit?”  Bobby’s skepticism sounds like derision, but he doesn’t bother to correct his tone.  Dean never notices.

 

Over the last spoonful of sulfurous beans, Dean shrugs. 

 

He’ll go in a day or two, Bobby knows, when his needs have been met enough to let him alone again.  It’s a futile quest, useless, not even quixotic.  There’s nothing heroic in what Dean’s doing.

 

Still, the old man keeps quiet.  There’s no point in talking.  His unanswered arguments would only fill the room with his stale breaths, and he’s got to spare those out nowadays.

 

“Want more?”

 

He’s talking about food, but Dean’s remaining eye fills with another hunger, and Bobby sighs, rising to collect the plates, leaving them to crust over in the sink while he leads Dean toward the living room.

  
They never lie down, never weigh each other naked flesh to naked flesh, touch as little as they can help.  Early on, they tried to make it tender, but every touch was a lie, and Bobby couldn’t manage it, not with him, not with Dean.

 

Books rock and fall, pages coming loose to flutter across the floor like downed birds as Dean’s hips bump and thrust.  The rough edge of the handmade shelf bites into Bobby’s palm, but it’s okay.  Better than the velvet weight in his other hand.  Focusing on the ancient title in faded gold beside Dean’s ear, Bobby tunes out the usual monologue of bent words and pleading and thinks instead about his dogs, all gone now except for Coot, and then of the books he no longer reads.

 

Everything they’d predicted has already come to pass and what knowledge they had is now useless. 

  
Tearing a couple of leaves from the book he’d been staring at, Bobby uses them to wipe Dean’s stickiness from his fingers.   Dean’s already done up and stretched out on the couch, his usual bed when he’s in the house.

 

Bobby returns to the kitchen to clean up the supper plates and consider yet again if he should use his last bullet on himself or on his guest.

 

_The Traveler walks a solitary road and with him comes the shadow.  Under its grey wings he is unseen by the Evil One.  Upon the wicked whom the shadow falls come doom, a harvest of sorrow and suffering.  Only the good are left when The Traveler takes his leave of them.  In his wake, the earth itself trembles, the birds of the air and the beasts on the ground echo The Name, and even the righteous cry out._

On his way to the shed to get his horse, Dean stops.

 

He always does it, and Bobby thinks, every time, that he should look away.  For all their own awful intimacy, there is nothing in it of the love he witnesses when Dean runs his hand over the rusted wreck, lets his one good eye roam her rotting curves.

 

Mice have made a nest in the passenger seat, ripped up the leather and pulled out the stuffing.  Turds scatter the stained white like dark stars in a washed out sky.  But Bobby knows Dean doesn’t see any of that.  He can tell by the way the man’s mouth curves up at the corner before he opens it and lets loose The Name.

 

Bobby learned a long time ago that he’s immune to its power.  Part of the deal.  Curse.  Whatever you’d call it that keeps bringing Dean back to him.  Some twisted sense of celestial justice is Bobby’s best guess, but he gave it up as gone a good long time ago to try to figure out what heaven wants from them.

 

The rusted metal of the gate bites at Bobby’s palm as he holds it open to let Dean pass.

 

He doesn’t say, “Be careful,” or “Take care,” or “Don’t do anything stupid.”

 

He doesn’t say anything.

 

There’s only one word Dean needs on the road, but in none of the many languages Bobby knows will he ever say it again. 

 

_The Traveler bears The Name and carries the burdens of the flesh, which must be fed, sin upon sin, lest he be purified too soon and the whole world perish.  Neither angels nor demons may speak The Name, for it belongs to The Traveler alone and only he shall speak it, ever and always, until it brings forth The Answer.  Then shall the wicked be banished at last and the good and righteous find peace and new life._

 

Bobby doesn’t keep a calendar, so he doesn’t know what day it is when the rider comes again.  He only knows he’s old.  Old and tired and ready to find out what comes after.

 

The crows lift from the house in a raucous cloud, and then, as though they’ve struck an invisible ceiling, they start to fall around him in a rain of ebony wings and open beaks from which nothing comes, not even a rattling last breath.

 

Bobby’s standing in a ring of murdered crows when Dean arrives once again at the gate.

 

“Your dog’s dead,” Dean says by way of greeting.  Without turning around, Bobby knows Coot has left him, and he sighs out a relieved breath.  He hadn’t wanted to leave the poor thing alone.

 

Bobby doesn’t move to open the gate.

 

Dean’s horse is skeletal, its fly-infested eyes clouded with cataracts, moon-blind.  Still, it nudges at the latch and with a fatigued screech, the gate falls open, canting on its one good hinge and hanging there for a long moment before that, too, gives, and it surrenders to gravity, kicking up a cloud of striped dust that settles around it like a shroud.

 

Without dismounting, Dean speaks The Name.

 

Bobby’s ears fill with a roaring, as of an unseen ocean rising up to devour him.  His knees unjoint, dropping him into the dust, where his crabbed hands scrabble to catch himself.

 

With an effort, he looks up at Dean, feels the spill of hot blood down his cheeks from his eyes, into his mouth from his nose, down his neck from his ears.

 

A second time, Dean speaks The Name, and in every atom of his body, Bobby feels his spirit struggle to break away from its bone cage and fly.  He wants to let it go, wants to will himself to Answer and be free, but he is bound by a promise he only now remembers making, and he can say nothing, not even Dean’s name.

 

Dean speaks The Name a third and final time, and what’s left of Bobby’s life seeps from his limbs.  He feels more than sees Dean dismount and approach, makes out a vague shape of two boots in his nearer sight, senses the light fleeing as Dean crouches over him and lays a hand against his shaking head. 

 

Dean speaks then a different word, one they’d never used before.  Last breath trapped in his throat, lips caked with dust and blood, Bobby cannot answer, but he does not have to.

 

Four hands turn him gently onto his back, two voices join in a litany of ancient words that go unheard as Bobby Singer, who kept a forgotten promise, at long last lies down for the last time.

 

_When The Traveller has cleansed the earth of the last of the wicked and his shadow no longer falls upon the righteous, then shall he have paid in full the wages of human sin.  He shall come to the one who has kept his promise and speak The Name in a killing voice.  And the one who has promised shall give The Answer with his life.  And the world shall be made anew._


End file.
